1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to rendering systems and more particularly to a method and apparatus for generating a caricature of a digital image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, if a consumer would like to generate a caricature image from a picture taken from a digital camera or a cell phone camera, the user must transfer the image to a desktop computer for processing. The computing resources required to develop the caricature image are not available with the current hand held electronic devices. As a result, a user has no alternatives to immediately create a caricature image from a digital image captured by a handheld device. With the proliferation with cell phone cameras and other hand held devices with camera capability, along with the ease with which captured images may be shared, users are constantly seeking devices with enhanced functionality. Thus, if a user had the capability of creating an image from the handheld device, the user will then be able to email the caricature image to a recipient, e.g., with a cell phone camera application or just view the image with the subject of the photo.
As a result, there is a need to solve the problems of the prior art to enable automatic generation of a caricature image from a digital image in a manner that is compatible with the limited computing resources of a handheld electronic image capture device.